Chris Lough

Fiction and Excerpts [1]

Humor, Non-Fiction || Finding someone to date shouldn't be like trying to party up in an MMORPG: running around, repeatedly spamming chat channels for a group, and anxiously seeking a random encounter. (Random casual encounters are for Craigslist. This isn't that kind of book.) No, seeking out Player Two is more like an old-school RPG: a gradual progression that, with the right walkthrough, becomes much, much easier.

Towers of Midnight, the second to last book in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time saga, is brimming over with amazing moments, from Perrin’s battles with Slayer, Egwene’s machinations in the Tower, Rand’s defense of Maradon, the forging of Perrin’s hammer, Mat’s rescue of Moiraine, and onward. To Wheel of Time readers, these moments were somewhat expected. They’re all main characters, after all, so of course they’re all going to do something fantastic.

What really took readers and fans like myself by surprise were the two gut-wrenching chapters near the end of the book where Aviendha watches the slow unraveling of the Aiel people. Shortly after the publication of Towers of Midnight there was some question as to whether Aviendha had actually seen the future past The Last Battle and, if so, if that future was fluid. A Memory of Light answered both of these questions, but it left a smaller one behind. Namely: Exactly how far in time did Aviendha see?

Big Damn Swords, orange blood, gods made of future metal… Brandon Sanderson’s books make use of a great variety of epic fantasy settings and magic systems, and each new series and short tale introduces yet more. 2015 marks ten years since Sanderson’s first fantasy novel Elantris was released, and since then the author has filled the shelves with so many different worlds that the ones that share the same grand universe are dubbed, simply, “The Cosmere.”

This variety of fantasy worlds sharing certain characteristics is not a new construct. (Role-playing games create this solely by virtue of publishing sequels.) But over the course of reading Sanderson’s novels, I started to notice more than a few parallels that the Cosmere has with the classic RPG series Final Fantasy.

Now that Ant-Man has closed the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s “Phase 2″ slate of movies, we await the hero-vs-hero calamity that will be 2016’s Captain America: Civil War.

Except…doesn’t it seem too soon for that? Aren’t there only still about 10 or so superpowered heroes bopping around the MCU? That’s not a civil war, that’s a volleyball game.

It turns out that the MCU’s Phase 2 was more expansive than it seems. There are now nearly one hundred characters, most of them with powers or superior abilities, that could take an active role in Marvel’s Civil War! Take a look at the below graphic to see what the network of Marvel characters looks like right now. (Spoilers ahead for Ant-Man and Age of Ultron, as well as rumored characters and links in forthcoming Marvel Phase 3 movies.)

Today marks the 159th birthday of Nikola Tesla, a man so bizarre and scientifically curious that it’s easy to imagine him figuring out a method to cheat death and live to see this year, if only Thomas Edison or his suspected OCD weren’t interfering….

Tesla brought true advancements to the fields of electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and talking about death ray urban legends while tipsy at parties. And although his scientific achievements are vital to the way we live today, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that what we as fans of science fiction truly laud him for is for being a wildly imaginative outsider.

Wesley Chu’s new book Time Salvager (out this week, I promise) is an extremely fast-paced time travel adventure, packing spaceships, floating cities, utopia, dystopia, Boston, and Nazis into one story while drenching it all in greasy whiskey. Michael Bay optioned the movie in a heartbeat, and by the end of Time Salvager you can see why; the book is just that action-packed.

But while the action may be big-screen, the laws that govern time travel in this novel are specifically suited for book readers. While Time Salvager doesn’t overtly state this, during the course of the narrative it becomes clear that the characters who best understand how time travel works are also the people who best understand how stories work.

In the fantasy world of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn book series, magic users known as Allomancers, Feruchemists, and Hemalurgists can bounce themselves back and forth between metals, store their own luck away for a rainy day, or (bloodily) steal these powers away from others. In the first Mistborn trilogy, the characters with these powers make war in a somewhat Victorian setting and not once does an Allomancer think “what if I propelled myself so far and so fast that I left this entire planet entirely and visited another star system?”

But we do. Because an Allomancer’s magical manipulation of a fundamental aspect of the universe may hold the key to connecting ALL of Brandon Sanderson’s books!

Time for some Real Talk: Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem trilogy has trouble presenting non-stereotypical characters but I CAN’T STOP READING IT and that’s because it takes all these great theories about physics and the universe and threads them together into a fantastically epic story that determines the course of all humanity. It’s like someone wrote fanfic based on I Fucking Love Science and it’s GREAT. And knowing just one thing ahead of time makes it that great.

For the last five years readers of George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire book series, like me, have operated with a selective silence around Game of Thrones viewers. Season after season we have so badly wanted to reveal what was coming–especially when it seemed that Joffrey had all but won–but at the same time we knew better than to rob TV viewers of the deep emotional thrills regarding Ned’s fate, the Red Wedding, or any of the other plot twists awaiting TV viewers.

Now, with Game of Thrones having caught up with the Ice and Fire books, readers and viewers are united in their knowledge of the series. Unfortunately, the nature of this common ground is bleak and TV viewers are left wondering, just as book readers were after the 2011 publication of A Dance With Dragons, if there’s anything more to this series than repetitive brutality.

Mad Max: Fury Road director George Miller almost made a Justice League movie, years before the Avengers made it to the big screen.

It’s one of the panoply of lost Hollywood projects, sunk by the 2007-08 writer’s strike and spoken of in the same terms as Tim Burton’s Superman Lives,Jodorowsky’s Dune, or Bob “Back to the Future” Gale’s Doctor Strange. Miller’s lost project Justice League: Mortal is back in the news because an Australian documentary team wants to show audiences what could have been. Judging from the scripts and other intel that have been leaked, the project had plenty of problems and could have fallen short. Except that now there’s a little movie called Mad Max: Fury Road that has us wondering just what Miller’s Justice League would have looked like, and how it might have impacted the DC and Marvel Cinematic Universes.

While we celebrate this step, LightSail’s biggest tests are still ahead. Over the next days, we will be monitoring our CubeSat as we prepare for the big show: the day LightSail deploys its super shiny Mylar sails for flight on sunlight. Stay tuned; the best is about to happen.

This year I was able to, for the most part, watch Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. without having to dig through the guts of each episode. I was really looking forward to this approach. Focusing on singular episodes in a show structured to mimic an ongoing comic book was making me a little batty, for one, and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.‘s structure as a network television show isn’t designed to withstand that kind of scrutiny. The more I focused, the uglier it got. By stepping back, I thought, I could better appreciate the show.

Instead, I just got bored.

(Spoilers ahead for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. season 2 finale and Avengers: Age of Ultron.)

ABC has renewed Agent Carter for a second season of 8 episodes and that feeling you’re having right now? That’s joy. (Or at the very least the lack of existential dread.)

The question of Agent Carter coming back to television was left open after the show’s first season, as its ratings were considered average for ABC and its line-up of dramas, despite the big jump in quality that Carter represented over its channel-mate show Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Last, I think, autumn (It’s been a busy year. I don’t remember how time works anymore.) Peter Capaldi’s inaugural season of Doctor Who concluded with a very, very grim season finale where, amongst other deaths, obvious fan stand-in character Osgood was captured by the Master, taunted, disintegrated, then somehow stomped on. It was a very drawn out procedure and the heartless episode made me quite unhappy, despite the strong performances from the principal characters.

Recently, news outlets have been reporting on a leaked email between Sony Studios executive Michael Lynton and Marvel CEO Ike Perlmutter which revealed that the resistance against a Black Widow or other female-lead Marvel movies comes from the very top of Marvel itself.

The email is only one part of a larger conversation between Lynton and Perlmutter, but it’s still very strange.

I imagine that all the recent hubbub about Iceman coming out as gay in this week’s #40 issue of All New X-Men (and by hubbub I mean “Oh, Facebook Trending updated itself again”) is interesting to comic book fans who grew up reading X-Men comics. Perhaps not because it’s astonishing or new or uncanny, but maybe because it represents the return of a plotline that cropped up in a little-remembered Almost Very Special Issue of Uncanny X-Men published in 1994, more than 20 years ago.

Meaning… my theoretical grandchildren could grow up in a world where alien life is a historical fact.

What makes NASA so sure of this time frame? Three reasons. Or rather, three missions that will launch in the next 10 years that will bridge the gap between theories of alien life and evidence of alien life.

In a rough and self-loathing-centric but also very true and vulnerable kind of way?!?

SpoilerTV has set pics from Jessica Jones, which is currently filming in NYC, and captured these great images of Krysten Ritter as Jessica Jones and Mike Colter as Luke Cage being exactly as they are in the Alias maxi-series and oh god, my heart, I can’t.

There are also set pics of David Tennant in his Purple Man get-up, now featuring Tenth Doctor-style hair. Which also means the Tenth Doctor is probably wandering around New York City as I type this, wondering where to get a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich. And I’m gonna tell him what I tell everyone: You gotta put the work in. Find that one place in your neighborhood that does it well and stick with them forever.

Inhumans, two S.H.I.E.L.D.s, and Ultron? The latter half of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. season 2 is slowly becoming the insane Marvel Universe-with-creamy-Coulson-center that show we always hoped it would be.

And since the twists just keep coming, we’ve set up a single discussion thread so that no one has to wait to talk about the latest surprise in Agents of SHIELD. Spoilers ahead for the latest episode, of course.